Horses of the North

IV

The huge wild bull was clearly on the very verge of a charge, which Milo knew could mean one or more deaths of hunters and/or quite possibly the escape of the beast. He thanked his stars that all seven of his companions on this day were mindspeakers, then silently beamed his message to them.

“I doubt that he can see any better than any other kind of cattle. He seems to be dependent on scent and sound, so let’s be wolf-wily. Those of you behind him make noise. When he turns, you be still and let those then behind him make noises; in this wise we may be able to keep him confused enough to all get within killing range. But when he does charge, don’t any of you try to show how brave you are—get the hell out of his way, if you can. Big as he is, he could likely toss a horse with those horns, and one of you on that horse.”

Milo reflected that they should have brought some bigger hounds, which could if nothing else have given the monster something to occupy his mind and energies until the men were all in killing range. But he had never really liked hunting with dogs, and besides, who would ever have thought that the party would chance across so singular a beast as this brown-black mountain of muscle and bone and sinew?

In the end, no man or horse was lost or even hurt. Thanks to Milo’s wise counsel, the great bull was never able to make up his mind just which way to charge until it was become far too late for him. One bola and then a second flew, spinning to enwrap those tree trunk-thick rear legs, then the bowmen came swooping in at a hard gallop from either side of the roaring, struggling bovine, to drive their shafts nearly to the fletchings in the heaving, shaggy sides.

When bloody froth began to spray from the bull’s nostrils, two horsemen risked riding in close enough to hamstring both the near and the off rear legs, then Milo dismounted and dashed forward, burying the six-inch razor-edged head of a wolf spear in the bull’s throat, neatly severing the great neck artery.

Walking, leading horses burdened with the butchered bull, they were very late in returning to the camp, but there was nonetheless tumultuous rejoicing, for no one of the Horseclans folk had ever seen the likes of the massive kill, which equaled or bettered the total in edible meat of all the other beasts slain by the hunters.

The tanning hide and the oversized horns of this particular kill were a wonder to all who got to see them, Horseclansfolk or the other nomads alike. At the feast, Chief Gus Scott and his subchiefs wondered and exclaimed over the trophies repeatedly.

“It’s all shaggy, like a buffler, ’bout the color of one, too. But who ever seed a buffler hide thet big, huh? And who ever seed horns like them on any buffler? How tall you say he stood, Chief Milo?”

“Between six and seven feet at the withers, Chief Gus, not counting that hump of muscle and cartilage. I’ve never seen any bovine just like him before. I was hoping you and your folk might be familiar with the breed—could tell me something of them and warn me of how prevalent they are, hereabouts.”

The Scott chieftain just shook his shaggy head.

“Not me, mister. Iain’t never seen no critter like thet, not out here on the prairies, nor neither on the high plains. Mebbe hecome down outen the mountains? I dunno, but I’m sure glad you and your mens kilt the big bastid is all. The less of his kind a-roaming ’round about here, the better.” His subchiefs grunted assent and nodded, fingering the wicked tips of the two yard-long horns. “B’cause thet would be a whole helluva lot of he-cow to have a-coming after you.”

In the days between the kill and the feast, Milo had had few spare moments to devote to pondering, but those few he had given to trying to imagine just how so singular a creature as the massive ungulate they had slain might have originated. Although his appearance was that of a man in his mid-thirties, Milo Morai was, at that time, a very old man—he himself did not even know exactly how old, but at least something above two full centuries—and his memories spanned a period from the 1930s to the present, through all the vicissitudes that had afflicted and at least nearly extirpated the races of mankind, killing untold millions in a few, terrible months by starvation and rampant, uncontrollable diseases, a few of these new, but most old.

If the areas of what had been the United States of America and the Commonwealth of Canada were a fair example of the rest of the world, eighty to ninety percent of humanity had been brutally exterminated by various causes in the wake of the brief, horribly destructive spate of hostilities between the allied powers of West and East power blocs.

According to his own witness and things he had heard, Milo knew that very few of the larger centers of population on the North American continent had actually been nuked. Several of the West Coast cities had been, along with Washington, D. C., Boston, Norfolk, Ottawa, Chicago, New Orleans and Houston, but these had all most likely been struck by missiles launched from submarines, since the High Frontier Defensive Systems had knocked down most of the ICBMs and satellite-launched weapons.

The response had been immediate and must have been devastating in the target areas on the other side of the earth. Milo had, in his travels, seen countless deep, now empty silos sunk into the soil and rock which once had contained the retaliatory missiles and their multiple warheads.

For a few weeks during that terrible period of the past, Milo had had access to powerful radio equipment and had been able to ascertain that few nations had been spared the destruction and subsequent turmoil, disease, starvation and death.

The People’s Republic of China had had several population centers nuked, then almost immediately had found itself fighting invasions across its western and southeastern borders, as well as a concerted seaborne invasion of the Nationalist Chinese from Taiwan, a deadly-serious rebellion in Tibet and assorted smaller uprisings in every province. None of the Chinese contacts had, however, broadcast for long, many only once, and by the end of a month from first contact, all had fallen silent. The Taiwan station lasted only some weeks longer, its last broadcast reporting uncontrollable rioting in urban areas and widespread death from as yet undiagnosed, plaguelike diseases.

The only station Milo had ever been able to reach in the area of western Russia had been a strong signal from Erivan. It had been broadcast in Russian, Armenian, English, French, Turkish, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Italian and had proclaimed in all of these the immediate declaration of a free Republic of Armenia. However, at the end of three days, the station had gone off the air in mid-sentence and had never again been heard, nor had Milo been able to raise a response from it.

London had been nuked, he had discovered, along with Paris, Bonn, Berlin, Copenhagen, Rome, Ankara, Tel Aviv, Cairo, Riyadh, Teheran, Bagdad, Damascus, Beirut, Belgrade and countless other European and Middle Eastern population centers, ports and places of greater or lesser military importance. The Russian army had swept across most of Western Europe almost unopposed until a sudden onslaught of the new diseases had more than decimated it and its foes indiscriminately along with the civilian noncombatants around them.

A transmission from Belfast apprised Milo that its decades-long turmoil had, if anything, become unbelievably chaotic. While refugees from devastated England and Scotland poured into every port, the Protestant majority were openly battling Catholic and Marxist rebels in cities and countrysides and trying to make ready for an imminent invasion of its southern borders by the army of the Irish Republic. The transmitter went off the air after the third broadcast, and Milo never could raise it again. He did raise a Dublin station, some weeks later, crowing about a “great, God-sent victory” that had “reunited Holy Ireland and driven the Sassenachs into the sea.” But the same announcer had deplored the terrible plague that the army had brought back from the north that was even as he spoke baffling all Irish doctors. Dublin continued to broadcast for several weeks more, but it became increasingly sporadic and its last few transmissions were all in some guttural language that Milo assumed to be an obscure or archaic Gaelic, nor would the station answer him in English. At last, it became silent, no response at all.

The Southern Hemisphere seemed less affected by the diseases and destruction than did the Northern, as Milo recalled. Durban, Johannesburg, Pretoria, Uppington and countless other large and smaller private and commercial broadcasts reached him as long as he had access to his own equipment. Quite a number of South American private, government and commercial stations were also on the air when he, perforce, left it. He was never able to pick up anything from Mexico, Central America or the northern and western Caribbean, but he monitored powerful though sporadic transmissions from some variety of underground research facility located somewhere in central Florida. This broadcaster, too, was still on the air when he had to move on, as were several locations in Antarctica.

According to the South African broadcasts, along with a few isolated signals from other areas, both northern and central Africa, from Atlantic to Indian Oceans, were aseethe with invasions, counterattacks, rebellions and every conceivable type and size of conflict along every conceivable racial, tribal, religious, political or social line. Egypt, seemingly not at all certain whether the nuking of Cairo had come from Israel or Libya, had launched retaliatory attacks on both countries. Libya was in a vise, being attacked as well by Algeria, Tunisia and a shaky coalition of Niger and Chad.

By the time Milo first monitored African broadcasts, the Union of South Africa’s armed forces had already conquered Botswana, Rhodesia and part of Mozambique, reconquered Namibia, and were pushing on into southern Angola and Zambia. Their military successes were abetted by the facts that all these countries were racked by widely scattered rebellions and uprisings, other borders were in serious need of protection from the incursions of other neighbors, and while hundreds of thousands, even millions—civilians and soldiers alike—were dropping like flies from the new plaguelike diseases, the white South Africans alone of all on the continent seemed immune.

Half a dozen Indian cities had been nuked. Nonetheless, the Indian armed forces seemed to be in the process of attacking across borders on nearly every side, even while riots, insurrections and rebellions on a grand scale vied with disease to kill most Indians.

Those survivors of the Vietnamese army that had invaded nuclear-stricken and otherwise beset China had brought back with them the plaguelike diseases, and these seemed to spread through Southeast Asia like wildfire, accompanying boatloads of starving, panic-stricken refugees to the Philippines and the islands of Indonesia. Australia had not received a single nuke, had utilized the harshest of draconian methods to drive off or kill would-be arrivals from plague-infested areas, but despite it all, still had found the incurable disease raging over the island continent from north to south, sparing only the scorned aborigines, oddly enough. Milo got most of this information at second hand from a Wellington, New Zealand, station, those islands having but recently somehow acquired the dreaded and deadly disease.

Military installations on the Hawaiian Islands had been nuked, and so had Tahiti. Otherwise, Oceania seemed from its various radio transmissions to be doing better than the most of the world. He was unable to get any sort of response from Japan, however.

South America seemed to be suffering almost as much as Africa, with a fierce war in progress between Argentina and Chile, another between Bolivia and Chile. Bolivia also was fighting Peru, which was in the process of trying to conquer neighboring Ecuador. Colombia too seemed to have designs upon Ecuador, as well as on Venezuela. Venezuela herself had moved into Guyana, taken over Trinidad, and was in process of marshaling an assault upon Surinam. Brazil had occupied French Guiana and was filling the airwaves with a barrage of nuclear-tipped threats against anyone who tried to violate Brazilian sovereignty or territorial aspirations. Paraguay and Uruguay both were fighting two-front defensive wars against Brazil and Argentina. It was from a South American source that Milo learned that the Panama Canal had been struck by, at the least, two nuclear missiles, one seeming to come from somewhere out in the Pacific Ocean, one or more others from the Caribbean side.

It had been later that year when he had chanced across the gaggle of sick, scared, starving children who, under his guidance and tutelage, had become the genesis of the Horseclans folk. By that time, after traveling through countless miles of once-populous countryside that now stank to high heaven of decaying and unburied human corpses, fighting off both there and in the towns and smaller cities where he scrounged for ammunition and supplies the huge packs of hunger-mad, masterless once-pet dogs—these more deadly and dangerous than any pack of wild wolves, since none of them feared mankind and most had recently been dining principally on human flesh—he had come to realize that the immensely complex and interdependent civilization was dead on this continent and quite possibly worldwide for a very long time to come. As for the children he had found, were they to survive and breed more of their race, he would have to teach them to live as savages in a savage, brutal and merciless environment.

Knowing that before too long a time modern firearms and parts and ammunition for them would become unobtainable, he taught them all the bow, at which he was himself expert, taking some of the older boys with him on dangerous expeditions to cities to obtain bows and arrows of fiberglass, metal or wood, even while he experimented with wood, horn, sinew and various natural glues in anticipation of the time when ready-made bows would not be available for the mere taking.

Adept already at living off the wilderness, he imparted to the growing children who now depended upon him some of his vast store of knowledge and skills, then sought through the dead cities and villages and towns for books he and they could read to learn even more. Horses and gear for riding came from deserted ranches and farms, as too did the first few head of cattle, goats and sheep. He had had them bring in swine, too, up until the time he had come across some feral hogs eating the decayed remains of men and women who had died of the plagues; after that, he feared to allow them to eat the flesh of such swine or bears as roamed in the vicinity of former haunts of mankind.

The first generation had grown up, paired off, sired, borne and began to raise a second generation in a settled environment. They farmed and raised livestock, supplementing the produce of lands and herds with hunting game and foraging wild plants, nuts, and the like. They might have stayed thus and there, had not a succession of dry years forced Milo to face the necessity of a move to a place where water still was easily available and the graze was not all dead or dying.

Milo and several of the better riders crossed the western mountains to the valley beyond. There they ran down and caught as many of the feral horses as they could and herded the stock back over the mountains to their holdings. Then Milo led another party back to that same valley, but pressed on farther north, as close as he dared to one of the places that had been nuked.

He found that others had been there long before him, radiation or no radiation, and that all the stores and shops had been most thoroughly looted of anything of utility or value. However, on the outskirts of what had apparently been an industrial park, he and his men lucked across a huge, window-less building. Upon the forcing of a loading-dock door, they found themselves within a cavernous building which had been the warehouse, seemingly, of a department store. It required weeks of work, numerous round trips to thoroughly loot all that they could use from the variegated stocks of artifacts, but by the time that the long caravan of people, horses and herds moved out of the desiccated area that had for so long been their home, the packs and the travoises were heavy, piled high with necessaries for man and for beast.

To everyone’s great disappointment, the dusty stock had not included a single firearm or any ammunition of any sort, caliber or description; however, after their thorough lootings, every man, woman and child now was provided with a bow of fiberglass or metal, as many arrows and razor-edged hunting heads and spare bowstrings as could be carried, and two or three knives.

Although Milo and the others had seen no living human on their trips to the western side of the mountains, not even any recent traces of humans, the trips had not been uneventful. On the way back east from the very first one, all walking and leading their heavily laden horses and therefore moving far more slowly than they had on the journey west, they had had the picket line attacked one night, a mule killed and dragged off into the darkness.

Milo and those others armed with heavier-caliber firearms tracked the raider and found themselves, eventually, confronting a huge, full-grown Siberian tiger. But huge and vital as the beast was—some eleven feet from nose to tail tip!—he proved no real match for six crack shots armed with big-bore hunting rifles, for all that the monstrous cat exhibited no fear of man and charged almost immediately. And he was just the first animal they had to kill during the course of stripping that warehouse of things they could use.

They shot two adult leopards within the remains of the industrial park, near the warehouse, while on a solitary, exploratory jaunt, Milo was faced by and had to kill with his pistol a jaguar. He found what he thought to be the answer to the existence hereabouts of these non-native beasts during another, longer trip, a wide swing around the radioactive core city. In an area that still was partially fenced, grazed and browsed a mixed herd of giraffes, wildebeests, zebras and several varieties of antelope. Having spent some years, off and on, in Africa, Milo was able to recognize waterbucks, blesboks, springboks, Thomson’s gazelles, impalas and what, at the distance, looked much like a huge eland. He kept a good distance, observing the herd through binoculars, because he had come across tracks and immense piles of dung that led him to believe that there were elephants and rhino about the place. A bit farther on, he spotted another mixed herd, this one including wildebeests, ostriches, oryxes, zebras and half a dozen types of antelope or gazelle with which he was unfamiliar, but also some specimens of big, handsome, spotted axis deer, a few other cervines he could recognize by the antlers as Pere David’s deer and a buck and two or three does that could have been red deer, sambar deer or small American elk. It was when he noticed a pride of lions moving through the high grass that he recalled that discretion was the better part of valor and also the fate of the curious tabby cat.

Upon his return to his party of warehouse looters, he ordered the horses stabled within the huge building by night and well guarded by day.

“I’ve found one of the places that the tiger, the leopards and maybe that jaguar, too, came from. Some of you men may recall being taken as young children, before the war and all, to drive through huge parks and view wild animals from all over the world. Well, there’s one of them—pretty big and well stocked, too, from the little I saw of it—only a few days’ ride to the northeast of where we are now. A number of the fences are down, and I’d bet that that’s where the predatory cats wandered down here from. As I recall, lions and tigers don’t get on too well in the same territory, and since I saw a big pride of lions up there, the tiger may have felt outnumbered and come down here to live on feral horses and deer. Those two leopards and the jaguar may very well be the reason why this area is no longer ravaged by packs of wild dogs, for both cats have a fondness for dog flesh. I’m just thankful that none of the big cats seem to have had the inclination to go east and cross the mountains to our valleys.”

The migration proved long and hard and slow, with the same drought conditions that had driven them all from their homes seemingly prevailing ail along their line of march. Game was very scarce, and many a night they all had nothing more than a few small bites of rattlesnake and/or rabbit to sustain them until something bigger was unwily enough to fall to their hunters or one or more of their herd animals succumbed to lack of graze and water.

Milo tried to avoid stretches of true desert as much as was possible, traveling on or near highways when it proved at all feasible, adapting a fortunate find in the lot of a long-deserted business of several dozen U-Haul trailers to horse- or mule- or ox-draft vehicles. At length, he decided to head them in the direction of Lake Tahoe, figuring that at least there was certain to be a plentitude of water thereabouts, likely graze and game, and, just possibly, enough arable land to settle down and farm. He faced the possibility that there might be people already there, as well, but numbering as they did some fourscore armed men of fighting age, not to mention quite a few women who were as adept with the bow as any man, he felt certain that they could either overawe or successfully drive off any current residents.

As it developed, the forty-odd families living and trying to exist safely in the environs of the lake under the overall leadership of a middle-aged onetime Regular Army officer and sometime survival buff named Paul Krueger were more than happy to see an additional seventy or so well-armed men added to their numbers, beset and bedeviled as they were by the periodic incursions of a large pack of motorcycle-mounted raiders some hundred or more strong, heavily armed and mercilessly savage.

Milo had had no stomach for settling down and awaiting the next raid. He and Krueger had pooled their available men and resources and staged a night raid of their own on the cyclists, who had become over the years so cocksure that they no longer troubled themselves to mount perimeter guards. No prisoners had been taken, but quite a hoard of secondhand loot and quantities of arms and ammunition, clothing, boots and gear had been liberated by the allies. Liberated, as well, had been scores of male and female slaves of the bikers, most of the women either with children or pregnant; those originally kidnapped from Krueger’s settlement were returned to their families if any relatives still lived, and most of the remainder accepted Milo’s offer to join his band. The things that these former slaves told him of their deceased captors caused him to wonder if it might not be wiser to move on—north, east or south, anyplace but west.

He had been informed that the bunch just exterminated had made up only the westernmost “chapter” of a highly organized pack of outlaws most of whom were scattered over northern California and southern Oregon on the western side of the mountains. He had been informed that these human predators numbered upward of a thousand, were very well armed and made regular visits to the now-extinct chapter for the primary purpose of collecting a share of loot and slaves.

“What you and your people do is entirely up to you,” he had told Paul Krueger bluntly. “But as soon as this winter’s snows are melted enough to allow for it, my people are moving on, northeast, probably.

There’s simply not enough really arable land hereabouts to support all of us—yours and mine, plus our herds—without spreading out so thinly that we’d be easy victims to those thousand or more bikers just across the Sierra. I haven’t wet-nursed my kids and theirs for twenty years to watch many or most of them killed off fighting scum like the pack we were fortunate enough to surprise up there in Tahoe City. When the parent chapter gets up here next spring, you can just bet that they’re going to be none too happy to find out that we killed off every one of the local biker-raiders, thoroughly looted the headquarters and then burned it to the ground, so I will be a damned sight easier of mind with miles and mountains between me and mine and those murderous outlaws.”

Krueger had sighed long and gustily, replying, “Twenty years, huh? Then you must be some older than you look or act, Moray, probably closer to my age. But, hell, you’re right and I know it; our combined hundred and fifty men and boys would stand no chance against a thousand, not even against half of that number, not with as few automatics as we have and no heavy weapons at all except those two homemade PIAT projectors and a few hand grenades.

“You’re right about the farmlands and graze, too, and there’s something else that maybe you don’t know or hadn’t noticed yet: the rains haven’t been as regular and heavy nor the snows as deep in these last few years. Some of the smaller streams are either dried up or are just trickles and the level of the lake has dropped off several feet, and who knows why? I sure as hell don’t. Maybe all the nukes changed the climate like the nervous Nellies used to claim they would if they were ever used.

“So, okay, we all move out of here come spring. But where? We’re almost completely surrounded by some of the worst, godawful deserts on this continent and we’ve got damned little transport and little POL for what we do have. What the hell are we going to do if we run out of gas and there isn’t any at the next town or crossroads?”

Milo had found the answer to this conundrum while, mounted on captured motorcycles, he and a party of men scouted the route northeast to the Snake River Valley, their agreed-upon destination. Just north of Carson City, they came across a roadside attraction, a “PioneerDaysMuseum.” Among other things within the sprawling building were two different types of reproductions of Conestoga wagons, a huge-wheeled overland freight wagon, a Red River cart and several other recreations of animal-drawn vehicles, plus a wealth of printed material detailing their construction, use and maintenance. Complete sets of reproduced harness adorned fiberglass horses, mules and draft oxen.

After Krueger and some of his men, including his blacksmith, had journeyed north and looked over the displays, they had hitched the reproductions onto pickups and jeeps and towed them back home, then taken them all apart and set about turning out their own copies of wheeled transport, harness and other relics, while other men and women devoted themselves to training horses, mules and the few available oxen to horse collar, yoke and draft.

It was at length decided, after a conference with the smith and some of the on-the-job-training wainwrights, that the wagons simply took too much of everything—time, materials and effort—to reproduce properly in the numbers that would be needed, and so with the completion of the wagons already in the works, all of the labor was put to making Red River carts instead.

Other crews were kept busy through the last of the summer, the autumn and the winter bringing truckload after truckload of seasoned lumber from lumberyards far and near, seeking out hardware items, clothing, bedding, canvas sheeting, tents and the thousand and one things needed for the coming trek north.

Unlike most of his companions on these foraging expeditions, Milo had been in or at least through some of the towns and cities they now were plundering in the long ago, and he found the now-deserted and lifeless surroundings extremely eerie, with the streets and roads lined with rusting, abandoned cars and trucks, littered with assorted trash, the only moving things now the occasional serpent or scuttling lizard or tumbleweed. Only rarely did they chance across any sign of humans still living in the towns and cities, and these scattered folk were as chary as hunted deer, never showing themselves, disappearing into the decaying, uncared-for buildings without a trace. Milo suspected that these few survivors had bad memories from the recent past of men riding motorcycles, jeeps and pickups.

Every city, town, village, hamlet and crossroads settlement seemed to have its full share of human skulls and bones and, within the buildings—especially in those closed places that the coyotes, feral dog packs and other scavengers had not been able to penetrate—whole, though desiccated, bodies of men, women and children of every age. Although he and Krueger had come to the tentative conclusion that those humans who lived on in health while their families, friends and neighbors had died around them in their millions must be possessed by some rare, natural and possibly hereditary immunity to the plagues, he nonetheless tried to keep his crews from too-near proximity to the dried-out and hideous corpses, figuring they were better safe than sorry in so deadly serious a matter.

However, the only two deaths sustained by the foragers were from causes other than plague. The first to die was a sixteen-year-old boy who forced open a sliding door on the fifteenth floor of a hotel and was found after some searching by the rest of the party dead at the bottom of an elevator shaft; he had not, obviously, known what an elevator was. The other unfortunate was a man, one of Krueger’s farmers and of enough age to have conceivably known better, who had disregarded Milo’s injunction to leave alone the cases of aged, decomposing dynamite they had found in a shed. He had been vaporized, along with the shed, in the resultant explosion.

With the explosives that had been stored properly and were still in safe, reliable, usable condition, Milo, Krueger and certain of the older men experienced with dynamite or TNT had chosen spots carefully and then had blown down sizable chunks of rock to completely block stretches of both Route 80 and Route 50, the two routes the former slaves recalled as having been used by biker gangs. They might not be stopped, but they certainly would be considerably slowed down, the two leaders figured, which would, they hoped, give the former farmerfolk more of what was becoming a rare and precious commodity—time.

It had become clear that were they to forsake the trucks entirely, they were going to need more horses or mules, so Milo had gathered his group of horse-hunters and ridden out in search of feral herds. Luck had ridden with them. They had found a smallish herd on the second day, and a week’s hard, dangerous work had netted them a herd of some two dozen captive equines, including six that showed the conformation and size of heavy draft-horse breeding.

When they had brought back their catch and turned the beasts over to the breaker-trainers, they had rested for a day, then ridden back out, this time to the southeast. They were gone for two weeks and returned—dog dirty, hungry, thirsty and exhausted—without a single horse … but with five towering, long-legged dromedaries. They had found the outré animals wandering about an arid area and managed to trap them in a small, convenient box canyon. After a few of the men had been bitten by the savage beasts, there was a strong sentiment to kill one for meat and turn the others free to live or die on their own, but Milo had insisted that they be roped and led back to the farming areas, stressing his experiences in certain parts of Africa, where such as these had often demonstrated the ability to draw or bear stupendous loads on little food and less water.

Paul Krueger had not been too certain of the wisdom of trying to use the camels, remarking, “There’s never been a really tame one, you know—not even those born in captivity are ever safe to be around all the time. And we don’t have any harness that we can easily adapt to them or time left to make separate sets, even if we had the hands and the material left to make them.”

Milo shrugged. “Well, why not try them as pack animals, Paul? We can always turn them loose or slaughter them for food if they don’t work out for us. As I recall, the Sudanese could pack loads of a quarter of a ton on each camel, and in our present straits, five animals that can, between them, carry a ton and a quarter aren’t to be sneezed at or lightly dismissed.”

“Who’s going to drive the vicious fuckers?” Krueger had then demanded. “Not me! I’ve got a care to keep my hide in one piece.”

“No need to drive them.” Milo shook his head. “Just hitch their headstalls to the tails of as many carts.”

Krueger grudgingly consented to the inclusion of the camels and was later to thank Providence that he had so done.